Civic Urbanity. The Places of Everyday Life

The current impoverishment of the state of architecture from a product, as a sedimentation of knowledge, to a product – due to the affirmation of a society with a lifestyle marked by the increasingly rapid consumption of every conceived object – is the dominant attitude: taste and contemporary fashion, whereby everything is reduced to entertainment culture with the consequent loss of sense of reality and with the rendering of this to a fetish, simulacrum, image. Accomplice of this attitude of reducing architecture to mere commercial production is the specialized and nonspecialized sector information system, which, by virtue of the culture of exhibition, has generally replaced the necessary critical distance in the analysis of current production with a sort of cultural consumerism. According to Frederic Jameson (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1984), one consequence of this attitude, which is a formal characteristic of the postmodern, is the lack of depth; it is the expression of instances with a hasty character where the image repeats itself losing its ultimate referent in an annulment of the notion of history. Everything is lived according to an aesthetic vision of events, consumed without expression of equidistant judgment and, according to the collage technique, with heterogeneous citations.